Web Developer

This is a guide on setting up a VMware Guest VM running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

VMware Workstation is an excellent tool for any developer, allowing you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. I prefer to do the majority of my development in Linux, but I occasionally fall-back to Windows software on occasion. The new Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 10.04, came out last April. I went ahead and set up a new virtual machine.

There were quite a few surprises along the way, so this is a quick installation guide. For the record, I was using VMware Workstation 7.0.0 at the time.

I will only touch on the VMware-specific aspects of the setup. The rest is basic Ubuntu administration and covered elsewhere.

Install the Guest OS in VMware. I went with the automatic installation.

After the OS is booted up, the keyboard will not work properly at the login screen. You will see an icon with a man standing inside a circle, click this icon and then click “Universal Access Preferences”. Enable the On Screen Keyboard. If you are having trouble, see the screenshots in this guide by Internet Techies.

The On Screen Keyboard doesn’t show up properly at first, so reboot the VM.

Use the On Screen Keyboard to log in. Once you’re past the login screen, the keyboard should be working.

In order to fix the keyboard issues at login, run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

I selected the option for “Logitech Generic Keyboard”. Now the keyboard should work at the login screen — feel free to restart the VM and test it out.

Next, I discovered there was an issue with the Shared Folders. The folders you make available in VMware are usually made available by VMware Tools at /mnt/hgfs/ in Ubuntu, but this wasn’t working. Any time I have issues with VMware Tools, I’ve found the solution is to just re-install it. First, uninstall VMware Tools with:

sudo vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

Go back to your host machine. Bring up VMware Workstation, select your running VM, select the VM menu option at the top, and select the option to Install VMware Tools. This will automatically mount a CD in the guest Ubuntu OS, containing an archive of the installation files. In my case, the archive was called:

VMwareTools-8.1.3-203739.tar.gz

Extract the folder contained in the archive, vmware-tools-distrib, to a location of your choice, I chose my Desktop.

First, make sure that you have all the build requirements installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) psmisc

Then run the install script in the folder:

~/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Hit enter at various times to accept the defaults &mdash; they all worked fine for me.

Comments

I agree Chris. I haven’t used Godaddy in a long time. I have been using 1and1.com for awhile. Ironically, now I am changing to hostgator soon. They are currently the most top rated host. I had no idea that they auto-renewed for Godaddy SSL certificates, I need to let some of my recent clients know that, I have referred a few to godaddy’s SSL system.

Thanks, Chris, this was helpful. The steps are a bit different as of 7/24/2011.

1. Login to GoDaddy
2. Click My Account on the top listing
3. Click “My Payment Information” on the left side nav bar
4. Click the small “View All Renewing Items” hyperlink on top of the grid of products that display on the next page
5. This brings up the page “Payment Profile” where all auto-renew items are listed
6. Click the “Auto” column header and look for any items turned “On”
7. Check the box next to any “On” items and click “Auto Renew ” at the top
8. On the right side of page, check “Disable Auto Renew” then “Save Changes”.

Before I found these instructions I went to what I thought wasthe obvious link “My Renewals” but this has NO SSL certificates listed. I assumed that they weren’t auto-renewing. Their 15 and 30 day reminder email messages make NO mention of auto-renew (unlike their domain renewals).

Suddenly we had our credit card hit. Not only do they auto-renew, they do it a month BEFORE the certificate is due to expire!!! I wouldn’t normally worry but this was a Wildcard certificate that cost $200. We had to drop it because we also found their claim of 99% compatibility to be untrue. I didn’t work on versions of Safari for the iPhone.

Definitely deceptive. I have a complaint in to them now. If they don’t resolve it I’ll have American Express reverse the charge